Live From New York, It’s an ‘SNL’ Biopic

I have no idea whether Jason Reitman was a Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fan, but man, it sure feels like it watching Saturday Night. Either way, Reitman’s film — about the 90 minutes leading up to the debut episode of Saturday Night Live — is extremely Sorkinesque, from the labyrinthian walk-and-talks around Studio 8H to the dialogue that is sometimes quite clever but rarely laugh-out loud funny. (Personally, I would like a movie about Saturday Night Live to be funny. The actors playing the cast and crew of Season 1 SNL do way more laughing at one another onscreen than I ever did in my theater seat.)

Still, Saturday Night’s concept is undeniably clever: Tell a heightened version of the hour and a half prior to SNL’s premiere in real time — although “real time” here is a bit unreal. (Somehow, a film that transpires between 10 and 11:30PM runs 110 minutes.) Even more than that: Structure those 90 minutes like an episode of SNL. Saturday Night includes oddball comedy sketches, musical guests (Billy Preston and Janis Ian, played by Jon Batiste and Naomi McPherson, respectively), monologues (Tracy Letts a veteran TV writer who sets forth an elaborate prediction of one cast member’s future rise and fall), celebrity cameos (hey, there’s Finn Wolfhard as an anonymous NBC page!), bits that don’t quite work (Nicholas Braun plays Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson for no reason), the whole thing gets a little shaggy in the final 15 minutes, and in the last scene the whole cast is there at home base to send you off for the night.

READ MORE: The Best SNL Cast Members of All Time

That night: October 11, 1975. That’s when producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and NBC executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) launched their bold idea for a new kind of late-night TV comedy: An edgy variety show featuring standup, rock and roll, and a repertory company of up-and-coming comedians who were mostly unknown to mainstream America.

As NBC’s Saturday Night (as it was known back then) nears showtime, the entire production is in complete disarray. A lighting rig falls during rehearsal, nearly killing spark-plug actor John Belushi (Matt Wood), who still hasn’t sign his talent contract. Muppet maestro Jim Henson (Braun) doesn’t have a script for his sketch. Despite being the old guy who got laughs during a disastrous dress rehearsal, Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) doesn’t know if his lengthy monologue will make it to air. All the while, whe NBC censor (Catherine Curtain) keeps slashing dirty words out of the scripts by firebrand head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey).

Most crucially, NBC’s smooth-talking head of talent David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) remains unconvinced that Michaels’ show is ready for prime time; if he can’t get his team’s act together, Tebet vows to pull the plug and air a rerun of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. As the seconds tick down to 11:30, Lorne rallies his crew and fights for the integrity of a creative vision that he can’t fully articulate yet. (Pressed by Ebersol to tell him what Saturday Night is, Michaels will only concede he’s certain of the “ingredients” but not the “proportions.”)

Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan’s concept of a frenetic race to the finish that plays like a pseudo SNL episode doesn’t sync perfectly with the actual history of early SNL. It’s been a few years since I re-read Live From New York, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ incredible oral history of SNL, or the underrated Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, but even if you’ve never read a page of either one, some of the notes struck in Reitman’s Saturday Night are just patently false. To pick just one: According to the movie, 15 minutes before the premiere of the very first SNL, John Belushi, Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and Lorne Michaels were casually shooting the breeze down at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink. Really? And the rink was open in early October? And no one else was using the rink or standing anywhere in the entire plaza?

That’s one of many odd and unbelievable moments that pile up like so many discarded cue cards by the end of the film. So Saturday Night’s not great history. But if you want history, go read those aforementioned books. What you go to this film for, I suppose, is energy, which Saturday Night does have in abundance. The swirling Steadicam shots, the jittery score, the ticking onscreen clock counting down the minutes to air, plus a couple performances that really nail the vibe of the Not Ready For Primetime Players, particularly Dewey as the rebellious Michael O’Donoghue, Cory Michael Smith as the cocky Chevy Chase, and especially Lamorne Morris, who nails Garrett Morris’ speaking rhythms and slinky physicality and gets a couple strong scenes where he rightfully questions his role on the nascent series.

In many ways, Saturday Night is not what the production of the first SNL was like. That’s because Saturday Night is not actually about first SNL taping, or about the show’s history in a more general sense. It’s about the mythology of this proving ground for the biggest minds in American comedy for half a century and counting. Reitman clearly made this film from a place of love and admiration for the institution of SNL and the people, then and now, who produce it. He might get the facts wrong at times; what he gets right is the feeling that every fan who grows up watching SNL imagines the show is like behind the scenes — giddy and chaotic and brimming with passionate creativity.

To watch Saturday Night is to get a taste not just of Saturday Night’s first night, but an idealized microcosm of what it’s like backstage every night. And if this had been the pilot of Studio 60, I would have absolutely watched Episode 2.

Additional Thoughts

-It’s hard enough to make a biopic about one famous person, where you need someone who not only looks and acts like an iconic figure but has to deliver a performance that rises above the level of SNL-style imitation. Saturday Night is all famous people. Some of the actors don’t look like their real-world counterparts (Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd), some don’t sound like their real-world counterparts (LaBelle), and some don’t look or sound like their real-world counterparts. (J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, who wasn’t even on the debut episode of SNL.)

-The more I’ve sat with all that casting, though, the more I’ve wondered if the questionable likenesses could be by design. After all, where would Saturday Night Live be without impressions of famous people by cast members who bear no resemblance to the folks they were playing? (Go look at pictures of Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford if you don’t believe me.) Maybe that adds more to the vibe that Reitman is going for of the ultimate SNL episode, in movie form.

RATING: 6/10